This is not a typical book review and I am not a detached reader. The book’s author, Andrej Grubacic, is a friend and collaborator, a comrade in the truest sense of the word. And as he makes clear throughout Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia, to be Yugoslav is to be implicated, to speak for yourself only through the filters of history, of shifting imperialisms, of age-old hatreds. Like Andrej, I too am Yugoslav, having been born in Belgrade to parents with roots in three of the post-Yugoslav republics. So I read and reflect on this collection of essays, originally written between 2002 and 2010, in the context the trajectory of my own life as both a Yugoslav and a leftist, weighing it as lived history of resistance as well as an abject lesson in the failure of the North American Left.